Interns | Chung Lab | GW SMHS

High School Interns
Joseph Chang — High School Intern Senior, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology 2025–2026, a year-long intern.Joseph is being trained in mammalian cell culture, cell manipulation, immunofluorescence sample preparation, image analysis, and epithelial integrity analysis (custom). He earned the co-authorship on Lucy’s SPARC student poster in 2025.
Rita Yu — High School Intern (2024–2025) Senior, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology 2024 - 2025, a year-long intern; currently attending Northwestern University. Rita was trained in mammalian cell culture, cell manipulation under mechanical stress, immunofluorescence sample preparation, and image analysis using a custom line analysis tool.
Saanvika Ravulapalli — High School Summer Intern Senior, Poolesville High School Summer 2024–2025, currently attending the BS–MD program at The George Washington University.Saanvika was trained in mammalian cell culture, cell manipulation, and immunofluorescence image analysis. Shee earned the co-authorship on Lucy’s SPARC student poster in 2025.
Ella Tyrrell — High School Spring Intern (Spring 2023) Madeira School Spring 2023; currently attending the University of Pennsylvania.Ella was trained in basic laboratory skills and DNA preparation.
Kate Choi — High School Summer Intern (Summer 2022) The Potomac School High School Spring 2022, currently attending Yale University.Kate was trained in cell culture and manipulating cells under mechanical stress. She presented a poster with Abhi and Rushabh at the GWU undergraduate research presentation day.
Lauren Butia — High School Summer Intern (May 2019) Madeira School Summer 2019, attended Case Western University. Lauren was trained in basic laboratory skills and cell culture.
Sonika Vuyyuru — High School Summer Intern (Summer 2018) Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology Summer 2018, attended UC Berkeley.Sonika was trained in basic laboratory skills, assisted with I-Ting’s antibody digestion experiments, and performed cell culture.

BAPY High School Interns
Raghav Karthikeyan 2024–2026 now attending Georgetown University. Raghav has been revising the lab’s AI code for robust breast cancer classification.
Kashi Kamat 2025–2026, senior. Kashi has been trained on the lab’s AI code and prepared the image dataset to improve the performance of the pathology classification.
Raghav Kasi — High School Summer Intern (2024)2024 summer, junior. Raghav was trained in basic cell-culture techniques and also wrote code for analyzing protein subcellular distribution (“line analysis”), which is widely used in the lab.
Ananya Gottumukkala — High School Intern (2023–2024) 2023–2024; Summer 2025; now attending the BS–MD program at Nova Southeastern University. Ananya has been working on multiple analyses of protein localization, clinical data, and cell morphology. She earned co-authorship on our eLife paper (2025).
Digonto Chatterjee — High School Intern (2023–2024) 2023–2024, now attending the University of Pennsylvania. Digonto helped upload our MAxSIM code to our GitHub repository and studied our existing AI code.
Prathik Nalamalapu — High School Summer Intern (Summer 2021, 2022) Summers 2021 and 2022, now attending the University of Virginia. Prathik was involved in cell-morphology analyses and created our lab’s GitHub page. Thank you, Prathik!
Jore Kotryna Vismante — High School Summer Intern (Summer 2019) Summer 2019, attended UC Berkeley. Kotryna was the first BAPY student, tracking individual HER2 proteins in live cells, and had an opportunity to “Be a HER2 Protein” herself. She successfully completed the project and presented her analysis of different protein movements at the lab meeting

Undergraduate Interns
Abhijeet Lakka, Undergraduate Student Undergraduate Student in Neuroscience, George Washington University Has been our intern since his freshman year; graduated, now a gap-year intern preparing for medical school. Abhi has been well trained in various lab skills, and he is now involved in the survival mechanism of DCIS cells.
Sarah Rachidi, Undergraduate Student Undergraduate Student in Biology, George Washington University now a junior, has been trained in cell culture and immunofluorescence image processing.
Angelina Baker, Undergraduate Student Undergraduate Student in Cognitive Neuroscience, George Washington University now a sophomore, has been trained in cell culture and immunofluorescence image processing.
Lucy Hemesath, Summer SPARC Student Biological Sciences I Cornell University, Ithaca, NY I 2023- Lucy was involved in a project about the immune-evasion mechanism of DCIS.
Semeya Parrish, Undergraduate SPARC Student (Summer 2024) Undergraduate Student in Health Sciences, Spelman College Health Sciences I Spelman College, Atlanta, GA I 2019-2024 Semeya was involved in the Greater DC-area breast-cancer epidemiology project.
Joshua John, Undergraduate Student (2023-2024) Undergraduate Student in Biology, George Washington University Joshua was trained in cell culture, cell manipulation, and other lab skills.
Rushabh Shah, Undergraduate Student Undergraduate Student in Biology, George Washington University Rushabh was trained in cell culture under mechanical-stress conditions and was involved in optimizing the plate-reader functions
Hyunsoo Yoo, Undergraduate Student Undergraduate Student in International Affairs, George Washington University Hyunsoo, 2020–2023, graduated, now a gap-year student preparing for medical school. Hyunsoo was trained in various cell-biology skills, participated in cell-morphology analysis, and histology data curation.
Mahi Bhatt, Undergraduate Student Undergraduate Student in Neuroscience, George Washington University Mahi, Fall 2022, now attending the GW medical school. Mahi was involved in imaging-based protein-trafficking studies and assisted with cell culture.
Kaitlyn Connors, Undergraduate Student Undergraduate Student in Biology, George Washington University Kaitlyn was involved in protein-trafficking studies.
Marisa Lazarus, Undergraduate Student (2019-2020) Undergraduate Student in Physics, George Washington University BSc, Physics \| George Washington University, Washington, DC \| 2018-2022 Marisa was trained in DNA preparation and purification.

Raghav Karthikeyan coding for a project — Raghav Karthikeyan (Senior, Thomas Jefferson High School)

Saanvika doing cell culture work in the BSC. — Saanvika Ravulapalli (Senior, Poolesville High School)

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